Custom WordPress Theme Design

The Ninja has done it again, he has turned his wildly popular Yahoo! News Tag Soup into a service called Tag Cloud:

A working product showing off the cool stuff that can happen when folks, in this case Yahoo! opens up content and services for a developer to use in his own applications. Folksonomies & Tagging are all the rage lately (See Flickr and del.icio.us for the most popular examples), so we thought it would be fun to see what happens when you automate the process.

Way to go John, too bad you weren’t given the time and resourses to do cool stuff like this while you were at D2, if so, maybe there would still be a D2… You can see an example of this in action here.

Update:

I asked John if he thought it would scale:

ok, let’s answer your questions. i think it’ll scale. Database is normalized. I don’t fetch anything I don’t need to. Yahoo API allows 5000 calls per IP per 24 hours, so I have a round robin system that uses a table of servers. It knows how many calls each server has made, and optimizes. I wrote the remote fetch script to take an interface parameter, so for instance, I installed it on one server with 23 IPs. I only had to install the script once.

Then I asked him what customization he was planning:

As far as customization, eventually I’ll do something like adsense ad customization, but for now, I think some well written css tutorials will suffice. I also want to add a parameter so that you can specify a number of results. So if you only want a tiny cloud, you could add /25 to the url and get only that number of tags.